File:MOT-Radio-1938.jpg

Print advertisement for the radio series The March of Time

Self scan of print ad appearing in the July 11, 1938, issue of Life magazine (page 65)

The March of Time (radio program)

Complete print ad from the magazine (68 pages plus cover)

Yes, 220 x 587 pixels at 72 ppi

To visually identify promotion for the groundbreaking news radio series The March of Time in the "Cast" section of the article on the series. Actors were anonymous on The March of Time, but this advertisement capitalizes on the celebrity of one of the regular cast, Orson Welles by picturing him and relating his history with the program. Four months after this advertisement appeared, Welles used the techniques of the radio series in his radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, and he parodied the newsreel incarnation of the series in his first feature film, Citizen Kane. Welles is the most notable star of The March of Time, and Time Inc. took the unprecedented step of featuring him in its promotion for The March of Time.

No; this is an accurate scan of a page from an original magazine dated July 11, 1938

This is the text from the advertisement:

Beginning Friday, July 8, and thereafter every Friday at 9:30 PM (E.D.S.T.) the Editors of LIFE bring to the air a new series of broadcasts of The March of Time. This new series at the new hour on Fridays will be broadcast over a new and extended N.B.C. network — your daily newspaper will tell you what station broadcasts the new March of Time in your community.

ORSON WELLES: 1935–1938

One day in March 1935, a tousle-haired 19-year old youth stepped up to a microphone and gave a trial audition for The March of Time. He had lived in China, could speak Chinese, had played Peter Rabbit professionally at ten, had held a job in the famed Irish Abbey Theatre, had lived in Morocco and London as well as Dublin and Shanghai. But he was virtually unknown in the U. S., had never before been in radio. When the 86-year-old munitions king Sir Basil Zaharoff died, The March of Time researched his voice, found it was deep, resonant, unidentifiably accented. Out of a dozen actors tried, only the 19-year-old newcomer could play the part accurately and his characterization was memorable. His versatility proved as great as his gift for dramatic impersonation, and he became a March of Time "regular", was heard as King Victor Emmanuel, Charles Laughton, Horace Greeley, Paul Muni, Senator J. Hamilton Lewis … His name — Orson Welles.

Last winter, at 22, Orson Welles produced the smash-hit modern dress "Julius Caesar," with Welles in a blue serge suit as Brutus. Then "The Shoemaker's Holiday," Elizabethan comedy with Welles making 300-year-old jokes funny; and finally George Bernard Shaw's "Heartbreak House" with Welles bearded and bush-eyebrowed to look like the author himself. Today Broadway's most successful producer-actor, Welles still occasionally breaks away to appear on The March of Time.

Orson Welles is but one of the men and women — actors, editors, researchers, musicians, directors, technicians — who during the past eight years, have made The March of Time a program unique in radio — Intensely dramatic, accurately informative, true to life.

Now LIFE brings you The March of Time in a new series on the air — and in this series of columns every week, LIFE will take you behind the radio scenes to tell you about the people who make The March of Time, and how they do it.